Microsoft Dynamics GP Technical Conference 2009 - Day 2
After staying up until the early hours of the morning, it was hard to get up again. I met Leslie, Mariano and Jaydel Gluckie from Horizons International for breakfast and then we headed over to the Microsoft Fargo campus. The Fargo campus is now the largest Microsoft campus outside of the Redmond campus.
We went back to our meeting room, finished making the changes we had worked out last night and printed out our notes. We were finally all ready for the second session. I think that next time I present at a conference with a co-presenter, I will organise to get to the location earlier and have another couple of days before hand to fine tune everything .... in person.
The presentation of "Troubleshooting Your Developed Solution" went well. It was not quite as crowded as the Customizing session, but the attendees liked what they saw. In the session we went through some theory of software development and testing before covering the tools available to you to troubleshoot issues in the different development environments. We sped through the presentation (on purpose) so we could spend most of the session running through a demonstration of the Support Debugging Tool for Microsoft Dynamics GP.
After the session, Mariano, Leslie and I reviewed the demonstration and discussed how we can tweak a couple of sections. After lunch, we presented the Troubleshooting session again and the repeated session was even better than the original. I must say that Mariano had none of the concerns of the day before, he is a seasoned professional now.
I want to really thank Leslie, who gave Mariano and I her time and fantastic knowledge to make this session awesome. She attended the session both times it was run and helped us keep on time so that we finished within the 75 minutes we had for each session. If you were there and enjoyed the session, please know that it was a combined effort from Mariano and myself as well as Leslie.
Next time, I will request for the Support Debugging Tool to have a session of its own as it definitely has enough in it to fill a session by itself. We can then give the session a more accurate title, so attendees know what they will be seeing. This will also allow us to spend more time on the troubleshooting methods with the development tools and we can do some demonstrations of how to solve various issues. Maybe next conference there will be three sessions.... Customizing, Troubleshooting and the Support Debugging Tool.
As we finished our final concurrent session, the rooms were prepared for the closing session. I managed to get hold of my friend Jeff Trosen long enough to get a photo. Here he is with Babs Coler who organised the conference.... Thanks Babs for a great event.
Left to Right: Jeff Trosen, Me (again) and Babs Coler
The closing session included a Questions and Answers (Q&A) section which started off by Mark Rockwell (Rockton Software) and of course Bill Marshall (MC2). The Q&A session was MC'd by Dave Coulombe and had a panel representing all the different areas of Microsoft Dynamics GP organisation. We also had an fantastic presentation by John Hancock on the new Microsoft Power Pivot tool for extremely fast Business Intelligence analysis.
Left to Right: Jeff Trosen, Chad Sogge, Gary Tronson, Scott Stephenson and Errol Schoenfish
After the closing session we had one last Study Hall session... read as ... time to socialize with the partner attendees and the Microsoft staff. Not surprisingly, I ended up with the Dexterity development and support teams.
Left to Right: Dave Dusek, Patrick Roth, Erik Nissen, Alice Newsam, Rob Anderson & Brian Roney
After conference finished, Mariano and I had been invited to a small gathering with the Product Management team at Errol and Cheri Schoenfish's house. I brought some Arnott's Tim Tams chocolate biscuits with me from Australia and challenged everyone to try the Tim Tam Slam. This is where you bite off both ends and use the Tim Tam as a straw to suck up a hot drink. You need to put the Tim Tam in your mouth as soon as the hot drink touches your tongue as the biscuit will disintegrate very fast.
Errol Schoenfish doing the Tim Tam Slam (thanks for letting me post this)
The conference was over and everything was a great success. But my trip was not over yet.
David
17-Nov-2009: Materials for the Troubleshooting session are attached to the bottom of this post.
18-Nov-2009: See the Microsoft Dynamics GP Technical Conference 2009 Wrap Up for more posts.